Exhibition: Curators’ Series #7. A Special Arrow Was Shot In The Neck… By Vivian Ziherl and Natasha Ginwala (13 Jun – 2 Aug 2014)

A Special Arrow Was Shot In The Neck… is the seventh edition of the DRAF Curators’ Series, with guest curators Natasha Ginwala (b. 1985, India) and Vivian Ziherl (b. 1982, Australia), co-founders of the ongoing curatorial research project Landings. Previous participants in the series include Raimundas Malasauskas (Lithuania), Mathieu Copeland (UK) and Pablo Leon de la Barra (Mexico).

Modernity, as a human endeavour over Land, has drawn up the categories by which territory is divided and placed under a contract of subjugation. How might the current order of material progress then be infiltrated by the agency of Land as a narrative substance? Facing the geographic imperative of capital stand the claims of Land as a living archive, as political matter, and as corporeal agent.

A Special Arrow Was Shot In The Neck…engages artistic practices that approach Land as a language-form of kinship, affect, and decolonial resistance. Bonita Ely’s 1970s etchings of the salinating Murray-Darling River constellate with Indonesian artist Juma-adi’s errant figures bearing the burden of displaced geography. The South-East Asian archipelago is a matrix of socio-political memory in the Batik works of Yee I-Lann, while the repetitive hand gestures of rural women ceramics-makers form a movement-score in the work of Tunisian choreographers Selma and Sofiane Ouissi.

The abstract paintings and illustrations of Ganesh Haloi draw together symmetries of the organic world with an archaeological imaginary. The exhibition will also feature a new site-specific mural by Indian artist Prabhakar Pachpute, responding to the DRAF gallery space.

An accompanying presentation of artistic research and archival materials will assemble references examining the subjective conditions of extraction. Desert fault lines converge in the seismic narrations of Californian ‘earthquake sensitives’ in the Otolith Group’s film Medium Earth, (2013) screened at Rio Cinema, Dalston on Tuesday 22 July, 6.15pm.
With thanks to The Map House, London; Milani Gallery, Brisbane; Experimenta, Bangalore; Akar Prakar, Kolkata and LUX Artists Moving Image, London for their support of the exhibition.